Scott Ritter: What the midterm elections say about America

Scott Ritter: What the midterm elections say about America

The vote lays bare a people unwilling to cast off the shroud of consumerist excess and strive for conscience and national renewal
Tuesday’s mid-term elections hang over the heads of the American voters like an executioner’s sword – halfway through President Donald Trump’s second term in office, the elections are not simply a referendum on the state of the union, but perhaps more importantly, a hearing on the fate of the president himself.
The first two years of Donald Trump’s come back tour have not gone anything like the American people who voted him into office two years ago were led to believe. They were promised an end to the endless wars in the Middle East, yet the US finds itself embroiled in an endless war in the Middle East which clearly did not need to be fought, and perhaps worse from the perspective of the psyche of the American voter, is a war America is losing badly.
Failed military adventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia have been a regular feature of the American experience for the past three decades, and elections – especially midterm elections where the president’s name is not on the ballot – do not normally hinge on foreign policy or national security issues, but rather local issues – the domestic agenda, so to speak. And there is no greater barometer for a consumer-driven society like the US of the success or failure of a domestic agenda than American economic health. The age-old question, Are you better off today than you were two years ago? is very much the talk of the town, and the answer should send shivers down the spine of every Trump loyalist scanning the polls as they would an EKG, desperately looking for evidence of viable political life: Americans most certainly are not.
It’s the economy, stupid is a famous American political aphorism attributed to James Carville, a Democratic strategist who helped manage Bill Clinton’s successful run for the US presidency in 1992. It is as valid a point today as it was 34 years ago, something Donald Trump and his supporters seem to have forgotten. Short term pain for long term gain has emerged as the Trump counter to Carville’s words of wisdom, a reflection on the price Americans are paying at the pump when putting gasoline into their cars or diesel into their trucks.
America is a land defined in large part by the automotive industry – when Bruce Springsteen belts out the opening lyrics to ‘Racing in the Streets’ (I got a ‘69 Chevy with a three-ninety-six, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor), there isn’t a man among us who can’t close his eyes and envision the machine as described. Whether singing along with Bobby Troupe about getting our kicks on Route 66 (the iconic American highway that connected Chicago to Los Angeles), or nodding knowingly at the title of Bob Dylan’s classic album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (named after the stretch of concrete and asphalt connecting Minneapolis to New Orleans which gained fame as the ‘Blues Highway’ and gave perch to the Freedom Riders of the American Civil Rights movement), the American Highway system and the machines that traverse them have defined the hopes and dreams of successive generations of Americans. But when rising gasoline prices eat into the slender margin of comfort most American paychecks provide at the end of a hard month of work, and spiking diesel prices raise the cost of transportation such that the price of the very things that defines American quality of life – food, electronics, clothes – rise as well, the American way of life becomes unsustainable, and the American people begin looking for someone to blame.
And that someone generally is the man whose desk once famously bore a sign reading The Buck Stops Here.
It’s the economy, stupid is a sad condemnation of what America, and Americans by extension, have become – a land